Saturday, 13 September 2008

Parklife

I am not cool. No, you can all argue that point but the simple fact remains that I might have passed cool quite some time ago. I don't like the right bands (Glasangeles, they're all the rage these days), I'm not very good at taking drugs and I don't wear my baseball cap backwards and baggy trousers with straps hanging off them like all da kidz did about 8 years ago and Stu Who still does. But I did have nearly 24 hours of being cool this week.

On thursday afternoon I was walking with Jerk in the park when a girl came up to me and said "Hello! You helped the day I got mugged!" It should be pointed out that I helped her the day she got mugged, I wasn't assisting the actual mugging. She had her phone stolen, so I called the police for her and bravely texted the word Cunt to her phone repeatedly so that her mugger would know how fucking rock hard I was. What an asset to society I am. Anyway, she was with some friends (all teenagers) and they offered me a beer. It's been a while since I sat in the park with teenagers drinking beer and it was fun. They seemed genuinely impressed that I'd seen Morrissey at Wembley two years before any of them were born and my incredible tale of walking to Sister Ray to buy Nevermind on CD the day it came out was met with wonderful "wow"s and awful "my dad bought it that week too"s. I sat with them being the coolest 40 year old EVER for about half an hour and then told them to hang loose (see, I know how the kids talk). I should NEVER have returned to that park.

But I did the next day. Stupid Jerk needed to be walked again so off we went. I saw "the gang" again and started to slightly swagger in a cool way (not an arthrictic way) as I approached them. The girl who's life I saved (sort of) ran up and said "I've got a tennis ball for Jerk!". She threw it to me and I threw it for Jerk. Well, I tried to throw it for Jerk but I lost my feeble grip on the ball and it flew over a fence on to the train tracks. Basically, it looked like I'd just gone "FUCK YOU, BITCH, AND FUCK YOUR FUCKING TENNIS BALL TOO". It really looked like I'd done it on purpose. Her face just dropped and my brain froze. Even "butterfingers" didn't pass my lips, instead I just grinned like an awful shit. They all just walked away. I felt awful but found consolation in the thought that maybe, just maybe, they all realised it was an accident and I was still really brilliant. This thought consoled me for about 15 seconds until one of them shouted "twat" from 200 yards away. Then I turned round to see Jerk peering through a fence at a tennis ball that she could never have. Please have the theme tune to Curb Your Enthusiasm in your head NOW.

I carried on the feeling of depression by doing a gig in Eastbourne later that night. Some of the audience were quite good, some of them were quite bollocks and most of them were quite not there. The Winter Gardens theatre is a big, big room to perform in and if it's not full it feels like there's no-one there at all. I was tolerated for about 6 minutes by them, then they sounded like laughing/listening/being alive was a fucking chore. At one point a man at the front looked behind him at the audience and said "I don't know what their problem is", which cheered me up a bit. I got home at 12.30 by stayed up until 4 forcing TV into my eyes. It's the way of the comedian.